Thursday, July 27, 2006

The Generation W Test

Okay, let's have some fun with this. I'll show you two beloved people from history in a similar pose, and you tell me which was a product of the generation currently in power and which was not. I'm going to give you a hint. One was named Jerome and the other was named Winston. Each made a splendid contribution to his times - in fact, each was a cultural icon. And before you call me a hater, remember, I do this from the heart - I respected and loved them both. One probably had many more admirers than the other, but the people who loved the other, REALLY loved the other. One more hint: It's like licorice. Not everyone likes licorice but the people who do like licorice REALLY like licorice. If that sounds familiar to you, this test shouldn't be that hard. Ready? Here we go: One last hint: Both were infinitely more articulate than our current President.Still struggling? That's Winston Churchill and Jerry Garcia - both brilliant in their own way. Jerry made the licorice comment to describe fans of his band - the Grateful Dead. Winston fired off some great quotes as well.

28 Comments:

You respected and loved Churchill? He was the leader of the conservative party, was the pioneer of the doctrine of "moral bombing" (bombing civilians to reduce a Nation's military moral). Churchill approved the Royal Airforce to engage in a strategy of indiscriminate carpet and fire bombing of Germany that killed an estimated 600,000 Germans, 75,000 of them children.

Churchill approved the Royal Airforce to engage in a strategy of indiscriminate carpet and fire bombing of Germany that killed an estimated 600,000 Germans, 75,000 of them children.

There are other similarities between Bush and Churchill. Though I agree that Bush is at times - how to say? - less than graceful an orator, he has given some speaches that will go down in history as GREAT. The September 21, 2001 address to Congress comes to mind. His September 23, 2003 address to the UN General Assembly is another. And his speach to the British from Whitehall Palace on November 19, 2003 was a great one as well.

Bush and Churchill were also both alcoholics. Where they differ is that Bush was able to stop drinking. Another difference is that Bush was able to get re-electected. Churchill and the Conservatives were crush in the 1945 election by Labour.

laurelhurstdad, I'm waiting for the time YOU get off the bottle. The Halliburton charges crack me up. It all stems from the "controversy" manufactured by liberals that Cheney had stock in Halliburton when he came into office. They cried fowl until Cheney voluntarily dumped the stock to avoid any conflict of interest. The stock then tanked and liberals accused Cheney of insider trading.

So, what is your take on fat-cat greedy Cheney donating seven million of his 8 million dollar income to charity last year? Any word on how much of the $18 million the Clintons received in book advances went to charity?

Actually, lets stay on this a moment. It is widely known that 'Red States' are far more generous to charitable organizations than are 'Blue States':

http://www.cfp-dc.org/cfp/generosity_index/

Remember during the 2000 election when it came out that the Gore's only contributed $360 to charity that year? That was on something like $600,000 or so in income. The Bush's had given something like 500 times as much. It would appear that Democrats preferred method of charitable donation is in the form of donating other people's money through taxes to their pet causes.

I think the true Halliburton scandal was their accounting methods while Cheney was CEO that he knew about. That's why Halliburton had to pay a fine later although Cheney was given a pass, as usual by an SEC of Bush appointees. Also interesting is the incredible lousy job he did as CEO - a pattern of mediocre leadership that continues to this day. I don't believe in no-bid contracts like the ones Cheney's "office" threw at his old firm? I think we could get a better deal if their were bids. Wow, Cheney made 8 million last year? Being VP pays better than I thought.

If you don't believe in 'no bid' contracts to unique companies like Halliburton, than surely you cannot believe in union labor mandates that similarly quash the free market, right?

If there was another company out their that could offer the services Halliburton does, as quickly as it does in urgent situations, that has their proven track record, fine. But that other company doesn't exist. And you don't hire a company to transport food and water to your troops in a war zone because they had a lower bid but no track record for success, and hope your army is actually fed.

Put it this way: If you take your car to a mechanic because the engine overheats within 10 minutes everytime you start it, do you shop around for numerous bids or take it to the guy you've used for ten years who you know charges a reasonable rate and gets the job done?

BTW - Clinton also gave Halliburton 'no bid' contracts. But of course you weren't 'politically involved' then so it didn't matter.

PS - yes, Cheney made $8mm. Still no comment on his giving 85% of it away, eh? Do you think that despite the billions Bill and Melinda Gates have given to charity, they are evil, greedy bastards by virtue of their income level? No double standard here.....

First, Bill and Melinda Gates didn't lie us into a war and get thousands of our soldiers killed and wounded. And let's not quibble about that: You do agree that he lied his ass off going into Iraq, don't you? Or are you so far in the tank for the guy that you believe what he still says: That his comments were basically accurate. Not only did he lie about Iraq but then he tried to say he never said things that were clearly on video. That's why I consider him a bad guy. He lied our yung people to their deaths. Second, I love it when you bring up what Bill Clinton did to defend your man. But what about the accounting methods used by Cheney when he was CEO of Halliburton? He tried to lie his way out of that just like Ken Lay did but they proved he knew. I noticed you glided right past that part.

First: Cheney was an accountant at Halliburton? When was that?! And no, I haven't heard about any accounting irregularities under Cheney's "reign". And that has not been liberals problem with Halliburton anyway, ergo it is merely a red herring. Address the issue of 'no big' contracts that you originally posed.

Second: Bush lied us into war?! Name ONE....just ONE...credible party that stood by the assertion that Iraq did not have WMD prior to the War. The ONLY ones in existance were Saddam Husein and Scott Ridder - who was being paid $400K through an Iraqi scapegoat for a documentary. So who was Bush to believe?! There isn't enough internet space to get into this debate again, but for you to assert that we went to war based upon a simple "lie" is disengenuous, cheap, and lazy to say the least.

The lies were in linking Saddam to 9/11. Cheney was CEO of the company - he wasn't an accountant - and he did know what was going on. It is germane to this discussion because it shows a pattern of deception and bad management that continues throughout his career, just as shooting his friend in the face shows something about his reckless nature as well.

The Bush administration NEVER linked Saddam to 9/11. That is a fact and it is irrefutable. They did link Saddam to terrorism....and rightfully so. Salman Pak alone was justification to overthrow that monster.

The lies came in the form of leaving open the question of Saddam's ties to Atta and al Qaida when the intelligence community had closed that door. Pretending the door was still open was a lie and you just proved a far more bigger point. When you go back and read the statements including the war resolution, it is obvious that the White House knew there wasn't a case against Saddam and they were jacking it up. The carefully phrased sentences, designed successfully to fool FOX news watchers who ended up thinking Saddam ordered 9/11 - are proof of the deliberate deception that led us to war. The lie is saying "maybe" when they knew it wasn't "maybe", and the carefully worded phrases prove their guilt. They also allow Cheney and his followers to come back later and say "We never really said that." You think you're refuting something but you're actually proving Cheney's guilt. No one covers their ass that carefully unless they know someday the truth will come out - which it did.

Your are, quite simply, wrong. But don't take it from me. Take it from the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean. Kean said this, "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there."

So is Thomas Kean a "liar"? And how about the Clinton Administration? Were they "liars" on this subject as well? After all, Clinton's justice department, in 1998, put this in their original indictment of Osama Bin Laden: ". . . al-Qa'eda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qa'eda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qa'eda would work co-operatively with the Government of Iraq."

The problem here is that you and other haters of this Administration are either subconciously or deliberately filtering the information that is available to fit your pre-conceived opinions.

Simon and Garfunkel put it best:

"All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest..."

"(Cheney's) willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It's astounding." --Vincent Cannistraroformer CIA counterterrorism specialist

Quoting Simon and Garfunkel? How boomescent of you. Here's an article from the Boston Globe about Cheney's deliberate deception and lies. Maybe it will help you get past "the vision that was planted" in your brain, "and still remains.":

Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Evidence of a connection, if any exists, has never been made public. Details that Cheney cited to make the case that the Iraqi dictator had ties to Al Qaeda have been dismissed by the CIA as having no basis, according to analysts and officials. Even before the war in Iraq, most Bush officials did not explicitly state that Iraq had a part in the attack on the United States two years ago.

But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning "more and more" about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq.

Democrats sharply attacked him for exaggerating the threat Iraq posed before the war.

"There is no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11," Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat running for president, said in an interview last night. "There was no such relationship."

A senior foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner, said it is "totally inappropriate for the vice president to continue making these allegations without bringing forward" any proof.

Cheney and his representatives declined to comment on the vice president's statements. But the comments also surprised some in the intelligence community who are already simmering over the way the administration utilized intelligence reports to strengthen the case for the war last winter.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney's "willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It's astounding."

In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.

But Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying: "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know."

Multiple intelligence officials said that the Prague meeting, purported to be between Atta and senior Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, was dismissed almost immediately after it was reported by Czech officials in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and has since been discredited further.

Atta was under surveillance in the States at the time of the meeting Cheney keeps saying might have happened. He knew that but was lying about the uncertainty. What do you think about the Atta meeting?Was Cheney being truthful or was he lying?I mean this is big. One of the 9/11 hijackers meeting with Iraq? This made a huge impression on a lot of people. Cheney knew it was not true but went ahead with it anyway dancing around with the uncertainty angle. With no disrespect but with just sheer puzzlement I'm wondering, why are you so willing to be duped by these guys?

The only evidence that Atta was not at that meeting is that his cell phone was used from Florida at the time of it. That hardly is difinitive proof. Someone else could have used the phone. And Cheney was dead on when he said we're learning "more and more" about the connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda. Something like only 1-2% of the documents we've recovered from Iraq have been translated and we've already learned about further connections. If this site allowed one to post links, I'd point you to numerous sources. But you're pretty apt at Google....seek and ye shall find.

Here's some more googled stuff below on this, but first I'm going to start with a Big Picture point. Osama and Saddam were not allies. Osama hated the secular aspects of Saddam. This Atta meeting was the single most important tie-in presented before the war. It doesn't make sense, and Cheney clearly presented it in a different level of certainty than it really was. Here's a statement for you to google if you want: There were greater ties between the United States and Saddam, as well as the United States and Osama, than ever existed between Osama and Saddam. After 9/11, Cheney sent our troops to die fighting the wrong man. If you're not a Boomer, but the son of Boomers, I suggest you think about enlisting. This sort of allegiance to our leaders could come in handy in Iraq. Now here's the googled stuff from the truthout site.: On Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney said on "Meet The Press" that "it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."

But that same month, Czech President Vaclav Havel was retreating from the more definitive accounts provided by his government, saying there was "a 70 percent" chance the meeting took place. Indeed, while Czech officials never officially backed away from their initial stance, officials at various agencies say that, privately, the Czechs have discredited the accuracy of the untested informant who came to them with the information. According to one report, Havel quietly informed the White House in 2002 there was no evidence to confirm the meeting.

The Czechs had reviewed records using Atta's name and his seven known aliases provided by the CIA and found nothing to confirm the April 2001 trip. Meanwhile, CIA and FBI officials were running down thousands of leads on Atta and the other 18 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 plot.

U.S. records showed Atta living in Virginia Beach in April 2001, and they could find no indication he had left Virginia or traveled outside the United States.

Even so, on March 24, 2002, Cheney again told NBC, "We discovered . . . the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague."

A few weeks later, in April, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a San Francisco audience, "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts." The FBI, he said, could find no evidence that Atta left or returned to the United States at the time.

In May, senior FBI and CIA analysts, having scoured thousands of travel records, concluded "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S.," according to officials at the time.

But on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney, again on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center."

Googling stuff from "truthout" is the equivalent of me getting my info from FreeRepublic.com. Truthout is a known lefty hack site. Come on, Bill, you're above that level of debate. Lets try to stick to non-partisan sources. Jason Leipold of Truthout fame is a known liar and sensationalist (not just because of his recent "Rove has been idicted" fiasco). That site has no credibility.

You're starting to sound silly. All this stuff is a matter of record. He said it on TV for Christ sake and I heard him. You must be doing this for a few laughs which is fine. Take my advice: Don't mess around with the minor details. Start arguing that we never invaded Iraq in the first place. Cut to the chase as they say. Better yet, deny that Iraq even exists. That's it. Iraq is a creation of Bush hating liberals to make your hero look like an incompetent buffoon. And the evil part is that it's working.

I'm not arguing the factuality of the individual quotes....I'm arguing the validity of the source. You can make any argument in the world by cherry-picking the information that supports your argument and refuting the information that refutes it.

For example, the left echo-chamber suddenly seems to think that the only general that has ever been involved in the Iraq war is General Shinseki. Why? Because he is critical of Rumsfeld and says we never had enough troops. Well, what about the half dozen or so generals who are involved in the day to day running of the war who say we have enough? Don't they merit some consideration?

Bill, you are typical of today's lefty. If someone disagrees with your lefty meme, they are either a liar or stupid. Our economy sucks because Paul Krugman says so, never mind what Larry Kudlow says. Man-caused global warming is going to destroy the planet because Al Gore and a group of scientists receiving research endowments tell us so, never mind the thousands of scientists who say it is just alarmist rhetoric. The same is true with every polarizing argument these days - Iraq and terror links, Valarie Plame, you name it. The difference between you and I is that I can admit that the truth remains in a grey area, and I don't fault my government erring on the side of caution to proctect us. That is their charge. You take your side's argument, filter your fact base to include only supporting information, and accept it as truth.

It's amazing that this child of the dark side actually used the phrase cherry-picking, since that is the phrase used to describe the neocon's use of 'intelligence' in promoting their lies about why we had to invade Iraq. (And then he says there was no Saddam-911 connection promoted by Cheney etc.)

This guy must be putting you on. I just can't believe anyone could be so simple minded and still manage to breath. He holds a train of thought, but ends up in a train wreck with his 'facts' and conclusions.

laurelhurstdad, you have become an interesting and predictable distraction, nothing more. This "child of the dark side" can at least articulate an argument using facts and opinions without wasting bandwidth hurling mindless insults. But you are at least illustrative of why you liberals cannot win elections. You pretty much embodie the reason Howard Dean got tossed by his own party - you hurl insults and speak to any who disagree with you like they are naive, evil, or stupid. That is what made him unelectable - and makes you come across as nothing but an internet troll. See you at the Hollywood Farmers Market - you must be the guy on the corner in the tie-dye waiving the "Honk if you hate Bush" sign.

The informant who claimed to have seen Atta in Prague doesn't compare to the weight of the evidence that he never left the States for the meeting, ignoring the whole point about the Saddam/Osama disconnect. Would you at least concede that Cheney's statements had the effect of making a lot of Americans believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11? Or is that going too far for you?

CLAIM:BORGER: "Well, let's get to Mohamed Atta for a minute because you mentioned him, as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.'" CHENEY: “No, I never said that.”- CNBC, 6/20/04

FACT:“It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”- Vice President Dick Cheney, 12/9/01

FACT REFUTING CHENEY'S ORIGINAL LIE ABOUT ATTA-IRAQ CONNECTION:“There is no evidence that the alleged leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, a finding that eliminates a once-suggested link between the terrorist attacks and the government of President Saddam Hussein, according to a senior administration official.” - Washington Post, 5/1/02